Porn Director: “My true responsibility was to make sure the girls got punished”

…in due time, I came to learn that within the context of the heterosexual L.A. industry, while my overt task at hand was to make sure that the girls got naked, my true responsibility as director was to make sure the girls got punished. Scenes that stuck out, and hence made more money, were those in which the female “targets” were verbally degraded and sometimes physically humiliated.

None of it was written in my contract, of course; it was more of a contextual thing. Like: Everyone’s doing it . . . thus, so shall we. My various superiors across the years saw the issue from a businessman’s perspective, reminding me quite openly of the need to keep up with our competition. Anabolic’s getting nasty? Then we need to be nastier. Another one of their gambits was “We owe it our viewers.” We have to give them what they want! (And what do “they” want? Scenes of degradation, of course. Gloryholes and gang-bangs. The facial cumshot became de riguer sometime in the 1980s, but by the 2000s, you literally had to do it in every scene or risk not collecting your paycheck.)

…we’ve all seen “bad” porn, hateful porn, and I think most have a basic sense of where it comes from. Men get bummed when they can’t get sex. They feel ashamed when they turn to porn for release. Hate and disappointment is released along with their libidos. Disappointment and disrespect washes over the sex workers. It infects the camera crew.

See also:

National Feminist Antipornography Movement
“As Jerome Tanner put it during a pornography directors’ roundtable discussion featured in Adult Video News, ‘People just want it harder, harder, and harder, because like Ron said, what are you gonna do next?’ Another director, Jules Jordan, was blunt about his task: ‘[O]ne of the things about today’s porn and the extreme market, the gonzo market, so many fans want to see so much more extreme stuff that I’m always trying to figure out ways to do something different. But it seems everybody wants to see a girl doing a d.p. [double penetration] now or a gangbang. For certain girls, that’s great, and I like to see that for certain people, but a lot of fans are becoming a lot more demanding about wanting to see the more extreme stuff. It’s definitely brought porn somewhere, but I don’t know where it’s headed from there.’

Video Presentation: A Content Analysis of 50 of Today’s Top Selling Porn Films (explicit language)
Ana Bridges: “…I’m going to begin to talk about what it is that we found after looking at these 304 scenes in these 50 top selling pornographic films. In total in the 304 scenes we coded a total of 3,376 acts of aggression. That ends up averaging…to an aggressive act every minute and a half. The scenes on average contained eleven and a half acts of verbal or physical aggression…”

Bridges: “So how many scenes didn’t contain aggression? About 10%.”

Bridges: “For verbal aggression, by far namecalling and insulting were the most common types. They were seen in almost half of scenes.”

Bridges: “Gagging and choking were much, much more common than any of us thought when we first walked into this project.”

Bridges: “Slapping happened 30% of the time… Most of the aggressors in these films were men…73%. By far the most common recipient of aggression was a woman. Even when women were aggressing, they were generally aggressing other women.”

Bridges: “How did the person respond when they were aggressed?… In 95% of these 3,000 and some acts of aggression, the person was either neutral, as in no change of facial expression or verbal expression, or was sort of saying, ‘That feels great. Keep doing it. Right on.’ And in only 3% did we see some overt expression of displeasure or pain. Again, it seems to be very important to the people who are watching this to believe that the recipient of aggression is fact enjoying it, is choosing it at some level.”

Porn Actresses: Most Careers Are Short, Few Are Lucrative (explicit language)
Although the industry is dependent on fans for survival, many of the respondents reported a fairly negative image of the imagined viewer… Ironically, then, actresses and actors are motivated in part to receive recognition from a group they know little about and often disparage. In addition, they reported little pride in the products they produce. Like most artifacts in the “sleaze industry”, porn is disposable, mass-produced, fungible, and easily forgotten… Unlike the “straight” industry, actors and actresses are paid a flat fee for their performances, and receive no royalties for successful projects.

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